


The Bell

by thomasjeffersonsmacaroni



Series: The Other 51 [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Gen, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-07 03:17:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8781001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni/pseuds/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni
Summary: The king is dead, and I killed him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was very different from anything I've ever written, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

_Ding, dong. Ding, dong._

The bell has been tolling all morning, furious arms in the tower pulling and pulling and pulling on that metal bar, over and over and over again.

_Ding, dong. Ding, dong._

"The king is dead!" they scream. "The king is dead!"

Every hour, it seems that there are new people who receive the news, new people who gasp in shock and then run to tell their relatives. I think there was even a young girl who fainted.

But they don't know that I already know, that I knew days before everyone else did.

Because I am the king's murderer.

The king is dead, and I killed him.

 

He was not too old, only in his forties. But he looked much, much older, brown hair already fading away to white, bones becoming feeble, skin wrinkling and pulling tightly around his stringy body. He was so weak, so helpless.

I almost pitied him.

The bell is still tolling, even though it is late afternoon, and his body was discovered in the earliest hours of the morning. Funny, really, how so many people care now that he's dead, but I can't think of a single person who cared,  _truly_ cared, when he was alive.

Everyone saw the crown, but no one saw the beads of terrified sweat that trickled under it.

 

I vaguely remember the king before him, his father, though I was very young when the kingdom lost him to banishment. Supposedly, he was conspiring with the mafia of another kingdom or something, and although the royal judges found him innocent, the people apparently thought otherwise. One morning, a horrified young servant found the judges dead, all nine of them, throats slit and right hands cut off and shoved in their mouths, and the king gone.

His son, the prince, was only five years old. Rumor has it that he wept for days and days. He was very close friends with the judges, you know. You can only imagine how he would have felt with that image burned in his head for the rest of his life.

The poor child. He was screaming for his mother at the official ceremony when he inherited the throne.

 

The next thirteen years of his life were spent under the watchful eyes of the members of his royal council. While peasant children played with wooden swords and dolls of cloth, the seven-year-old, eleven-year-old, fifteen-year-old king played with the minds and wills of the world's decision makers.

And, when he was eighteen, and officially eligible to rule in his own right, his life was a constant dance with his inner self, a dance that no one else could see.

He came so close to slipping during that time. So close, that even the lightest wind had the potential to tip him over the edge.

But then a hurricane grabbed him and swept him away.

 

The hurricane was a princess from a different kingdom, just a year older than him and completely eligible for marriage. The logic that he explained to his small council was that he needed the alliance, because both kingdoms had materials that the other required.

He would never explain to a bunch of old men how his heart skipped a beat when her green eyes shone in his direction, how she graced him with a smile that brought him out of his foggy haze and back to life, or how they had once accidentally started a conversation about politics and she showed to him that she had a better grasp of it than he did.

He courted her at first with the commonest of courtesies, but he wooed her when she started taking steps into the deepest, darkest reaches of his mind. And she took him by the hand and pulled him out of the hell in which he lived, the hell that even he did not understand, and she continued leading him farther and farther away, swearing on her life that she would do so until one or both of them died.

Why do I care so much about the inner hell of an awful king, of the man that I killed? The simple answer is, I don't. The longer answer would take me a lifetime to explain, and I have a lifetime to get back to.

The king's.

 

His mother died of a fever about a month before the birth of his second child, a daughter, and four years after the birth of twins, a boy and a girl. They inherited the best qualities of both parents, their smiles made the king smile wider than he ever had in his life, and legend has it that he took his son to the gates of the city where he saw his father last and promised that he would never leave him before it was time.

That was the Golden Age of the king's rule, a golden age during which everyone, even the poorest of the peasants, lived in happiness and prosperity. Those were the times during which thoughts of assassination were on no one's mind, perhaps banished to another kingdom, in the minds of the citizens perhaps gone forever.

They arose from hell like some sorts of mythical birds, impossibly dark wings flying, sharp beak slicing through the air, in the aftermath of the Great Capital Fire.

 

No one knew how it started, though there was speculation that led to investigation from the police. They never figured out whether or not it was started accidentally, and even now, no one in the kingdom knows.

No, not me. I didn't start it. I'm an awful person, but not  _that_ awful.

Anyway, it burned half of the capital until there were ashes and the stray stick of wood, and then it spread to the castle and utterly obliterated it.

The king and two of his servants, who were away doing business, were the only ones that survived. The bodies of his wife, daughters, and son were found black and charred, and when the king beheld them, he was so still that he fainted to the ground. He had to be carried to his bed, where he stayed in that same exact position for two days, so long that the doctors thought that he had died. Even weeks after the event, even  _months,_ he stayed in his room, weeping for the loves that he had lost.

It was only after a year that he was told that he had to return to his duties, that the given mourning period was over, that the rest of the world had moved on, even her parents, and that so should he.

He was forced into the throne instead of the bed where he belonged. That moment when he first came into the decision making room, having aged ten years in the time of one, long white hair tied into a messy ponytail, black bags under his eyes, was when he first started being reckless, losing the ability to think through his grief. That was when he started being a bad king.

And that was when I knew that I had to kill him.

Maybe then someone capable could take over, and our kingdom would finally be saved.

What? No. Not me. I'd be  _awful._ Someone like...my cousin, maybe. My cousin would be a good king. He's rational, he's polite, and he won't lose it over his family dying.

I would have helped my cousin become king, if I could. But I guess that when I killed the king, I indirectly did.

Or maybe directly.

 

In the dark of night, just before morning, I was in his room already, shivering in the cool air, having stayed up all night thinking about what I was about to do. He was in his bed, and he was lying down. So peaceful, and yet so sad. I felt pity, and yet I did not. That was a night of contradictions for the both of us.

I used a knife, in case you were wondering. A knife directly to his heart, and then I waited as the life poured out of him and the peace poured in.

He smiled as he died. He  _smiled,_ a soft little thing that no one had seen for years. It was the last thing that he did before he went completely limp.

There was so much blood when I did the deed. So much blood pouring out of the king's chest and staining the fancy white pajamas that he was wearing. I hadn't even known that there could be so much blood in a person.

I couldn't help it. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I sat up in my bed weakly and vomited all over my stomach and my legs. It got all over my robes, mixing with the blood. All over my kingly robes.

The bell tolls for the king, and the bell tolls for his murderer. They are one and the same.

The king is dead, and I killed him.


End file.
